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NY1: Funeral Held For Queens Soldier Killed In Iraq

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Motorcycles roared onto 145th Road in Brookville Tuesday, leading the funeral procession for 18-year-old Private Le Ron Wilson, who was killed in Iraq on July 6th when his vehicle hit an explosive device.

"He was a great kid, always outgoing, always willing to do anything., really fun to hang out with,” said Wilson’s friend Vernon Cruz.

"Someone so young, so close to us, who hung out with us, you know, this happens, and you don't know how to take it, you just gotta keep moving forward, that’s about it,” said another friend Daniel Rafael.

Hundreds of mourners made their way into Christ the King church to remember Wilson, who came to New York from Trinidad at the age of 11.

For his 17th birthday, he asked his mother to sign enlistment papers for the army, and she did it.

He joined up after graduation from Thomas Edison High School.

"We all told him not to go, but he still went,” said Wilson’s aunt Anne Marie Charles. “That was his choice."

Wilson followed in the footsteps of his father, a Cadet Force Major in Trinidad.

"I'm very proud of him. I don't want his name to just be a name hanging on a wall. I want him to live on,” said Wilson’s father Lawrence Wilson. “I've been promised by a couple people that they're going to do whatever they can to keep his name living on and that's what I hope. I'm going to fight every fight possible to ensure that his name lives on. He didn't die for no reason. He died for a cause.”

Le Ron Wilson was posthumously awarded the Good Conduct, Bronze Star and Purple Heart medals.

Wilson will be buried with full military honors at Long Island National Cemetery.

Ed In The Apple: Does Klein Sound Like GW43? Is Joel “Spinning” the DOE? Can We Believe DOE Press Releases?...

Original blog entry...

Is Joel Klein sounding increasingly like GW 43?

Even leading Republican senators are beginning to call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq - everytime Bush praises our troops and points to progress in Iraq, eyes roll …

As Klein spins out press release after press release lauding his own efforts he is beginning to sound more Bush-like.

Claims of increasing ELA and Math scores and higher graduation rates mirror claims of the success of the “surge.”

Bob Gordon and Roland Fryer, Klein latest “generals” seem to be the DOE equivalent of General Petreus.

Fred Smith , a retired Department data analyst, quoting an audit of the ELA test found that scores were inflated. Teachers in small high schools mark papers of their own students. Are the scores inflated? Only an outside audit can allay suspicions …

Diane Ravitch , a leading scholar, calls the Klein/Fryer “pay for performance” plan “unethical and immoral.” Her analysis of the ELA test scores is far less promising than that of the Klein administration.

Sol Stern , a resident scholar at the Manhattan Institute has been a continuing critic of the Department approach to teaching reading.

If we take a closer look at the high school graduation rates -if we look at college readiness we should be quite concerned. The City University of New York (CUNY) has a college readiness rubric - it uses grades on Regents Examinations and the number of Regents passed - it concludes that a diploma with advanced designation is the baseline for college readiness.

What percentage of high school graduates are “college ready”?

The answer of that in most schools less than half of graduates are “college ready” using the CUNY college readiness rubric, and, in some schools fewer than a quarter are “college ready.”

No surprise … the Department is selective in the data it releases. In overwhelming numbers high school graduates are only ready for non-credit remedial classes in college.

The latest Department “innovation” is “unique and different” summer schools. Principals are encouraged to offer summer schools that give “credit recovery” programs - ways to get around the State Ed Department requirement that a credit bearing course requires 54 hours of instruction. The message from Tweed: a wink and a nod …

There is an irony that GW43 is credited with the phrase , “…the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Hopefully the recent Carnegie Foundation College Readiness Grant will override Klein cynicism.

As the 08 Presidential election approaches GW43 will probably begin to extricate us from Iraq and as mayoral control sunset also approaches one wonders whether the school system will adopt a more student/parent/teacher friendly policy, i.e., Randi Weingarten’s speech at the Edustat Summit?

Harper's Magazine: "The Environment" by Bill McKibben...

One of the best things about the departure of the Bush Administration will be the end of headache-creating cognitive dissonance. It has taken over institutions ostensibly devoted to defending the natural world—the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Council on Environmental Quality—and turned them into organizations devoted to environmental degradation. And it has passed a set of anti-environmental laws that sound like they were dreamed up by wild-eyed nature lovers—the Clear Skies Act turns out to gut the old Clean Air Act, for instance, and the Healthy Forests Initiative has initiated a great deal of unhealthy deforestation. (“No Tree Left Behind,” someone quickly dubbed it.) We’ll not be in some new green nirvana when Bush finally leaves, but at least we might start trying to solve real problems.

We already faced daunting environmental challenges in 2000, of course, challenges that would have taken decades of good-faith effort to overcome. But rather than attempt the difficult and slow reversal of our cheap-energy economy, Bush has eagerly raced forward into whole new worlds of environmental turmoil. You can see this reckless disregard most plainly, alas, when you look at the worst problem the country faces: climate change.

Bush came into office promising that he would require U.S. power plants to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, and if he’d stuck to the plan, our country would already look quite different. Solar panels would have begun to sprout in real numbers, cars would be smaller, we’d be building more passenger trains. Instead, Bush repudiated the promise within a few weeks of taking office. He said he didn’t want to do anything that would raise the price of energy. His energy task force, chaired by Dick Cheney, barely even mentioned the possibility of global warming. It concentrated on new places to find fossil fuel, new pipelines to carry it, new refineries to refine it—and indeed, just as Cheney suggested, there are about 159 new coal-fired power plants in some stage of planning or construction around the country. Meanwhile, carbon-dioxide output has increased an average of 1.6 percent every year—and the average price for a gallon of gas has nearly doubled.

But Bush’s folly at home isn’t the worst of it. As soon as he took office, he also repudiated America’s participation in the Kyoto treaty process, the one international attempt to begin reining in carbon emissions. And he did it at the critical moment when China and India were just beginning their rapid energy takeoffs. It’s possible that this is what history will judge Bush most sternly for, even more than the Iraq war. With real effort and real resources, we might have nudged the emerging economies onto a different energy trajectory in 2000, but by now their path appears set. Plans call for some 600 new coal-fired plants in China and India alone; the Chinese open a new plant every week.

Still, there is much that can be done. As the head of a vast regulatory body, the next president can exert significant influence on environmental rules. The Bush years began with the news that rules for allowable arsenic concentration in drinking water were being revised—and not in the direction of more protection. The trend continues. Earlier this winter a Senate hearing revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency was considering weakening lead standards and ceasing the testing for perchlorate—a potent endocrine disruptor—in the nation’s water supply. The EPA has also narrowed its “new source review” policy, which requires power companies to install modern pollution controls when they expand their plants. The result, according to a 2006 study, will be 2.7 million additional tons of nitrogen oxide, 13 million additional tons of sulfur dioxide, and 660 million additional tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the lifetime of the plants—unless the next president changes the rules once again.

Such changes, though, will require appointing people who care about the environment to positions of real responsibility. The Bush environmental team has come straight from the industries it now regulates. Mark Rey, the Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment, spent eighteen years as a timber lobbyist; Jeffrey Holmstead, the assistant EPA administrator for air and radiation, was a lawyer who represented the Alliance for Constructive Air Policy, an electric-utility trade group; and the list goes on. Do these insider links have consequences? Well, the New York Times reported in March that Philip A. Cooney, the onetime chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality—and a former “climate team leader” at the American Petroleum Institute—had “repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming.” It shouldn’t be too hard to find people to run regulatory agencies who don’t come from the organizations being regulated.

Even if these agencies wanted to enforce the law, though, they’d have trouble doing so on their sharply reduced budgets. This year, for instance, EPA funding for research and development is at its lowest level since 1987, and the agency’s own internal watchdog, the Office of Inspector General, faces deep cuts in personnel. And it’s not just enforcement money that’s disappearing. Take the National Park system, which Bush, running for president in 2000, declared needed $5 billion in additional funding. Instead, national parks over the course of his administration have been required to do more with less, and those budget shortfalls have all kinds of unintended consequences. A cash-poor Redwood National Park, for instance, was forced to reduce its park patrols, and now lumber peddlers are sneaking in at night and poaching fallen trees.

Most important, the next president will have to put the environment, and especially carbon policy, at the center of every diplomatic effort. That will be a novel experience for a war-oriented foreign policy elite—but the notion that “terror” represents our greatest threat is impossible to maintain once you’ve read the scientific predictions for rising seas, looming droughts, falling harvests. The Kyoto Protocol we didn’t sign will expire in 2012, and negotiations are beginning for whatever will succeed it. Unless there’s a U.S.-led effort to produce something truly dramatic, the world might as well not bother.

CBS News: Bush On 'No Child Left Behind'...

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Bush On 'No Child Left Behind'

CBS News RAW: President Bush spoke about the benefits of "No Child Left Behind" as the controversial education bill comes up before Congress for reauthorization.

Truthout.org: Bush Flips Off Spotted Owls by Kelpie Wilson...

How important are owls in the scheme of things? How important are forests? What do most Americans know about forests?

The answer to the last question is that most Americans think that the majority of forests are managed by the Forest Service or the Park Service. Most Americans also think that those forests are protected from logging.

Both answers are wrong. About 60 percent of the nation's forests are privately owned, and only a small percentage of forests on public land are protected from logging. In the Pacific Northwest, only about 15 percent of the original, native old-growth forest remains. Many people remember the battles over the last of big trees that took place in the 1980s and 90s, and assume that the treehuggers won and the old-growth forests are protected. They would be wrong about that too.

In 1993, a few months after Bill Clinton took office, he initiated the Northwest Forest Plan. That plan settled a lawsuit over the northern spotted owl by setting aside habitat for the owl. But it did not protect all of the remaining old-growth trees and it did not protect anything permanently. It was an administrative solution, vulnerable to the kind of underhanded, undermining tactics so typical of the Bush administration.

A few years ago, replicating a now widely used tactic, a group of timber companies sued the federal government over the spotted owl. Shedding crocodile tears of concern for the owl, whose numbers continue to decline, they claimed that the Northwest Forest Plan was at fault and that the US Fish and Wildlife Service needed to come up with a new species recovery plan. The result of that suit was a new critical habitat proposal, released on June 12, which actually reduces protected owl habitat by 23 percent - about 1.6 million acres.

The best owl habitat is forest with the biggest, oldest, most valuable trees. Could it be a coincidence that a Bush administration owl-recovery plan ends up making more trees available to timber companies?

I spoke with Dominick DellaSala, a scientist with the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy, who served on the Fish and Wildlife Service's owl-recovery plan committee. DellaSala testified to the House Natural Resources Committee at a May 9 hearing on "Endangered Species Implementation: Science or Politics?" about political interference in the recovery plan committee's work.

To start with, a committee that works on an endangered-species recovery plan is usually composed of scientific experts on that species, he said. In this case, only three out of the twelve committee members were biologists, and only one of those, a timber industry scientist, was a recognized owl expert.

Even so, the committee recommended a recovery strategy for the owl based on the Northwest Forest Plan, recognizing that the NWFP was itself based on the results of years of study showing that the owls' No. 1 need is for untouched old-growth forests. To make up for its deficiency in scientific expertise, the committee asked the US Fish and Wildlife Service to provide a structure for scientific peer review of their findings. Their request was denied. Instead of peer review, they got a political hack job.

Soon after submitting their recommendations, the owl-recovery committee was told that their plan would be scrutinized by a "Washington DC Oversight Committee," consisting of high-ranking officials from the departments of Agriculture and Interior. One of the members of this oversight committee was Deputy Assistant Interior Secretary Julie McDonald.

McDonald quit under fire on April 30, just before the House Resources Committee oversight hearing. An Interior Department Inspector General report had accused her of manipulating data on endangered species to produce results that would be more convenient for developers, miners, ranchers and loggers.

Once the DC oversight committee got involved in the spotted owl plan, scientific principles became a lost cause. The first thing that happened, according to DellaSala, was an instruction to "flip and switch" the presentation of threats to the spotted owl. Instead of emphasizing the need to protect the owl's habitat, the recovery plan was to emphasize the threat of competition from an invasive species, the barred owl.

The barred owl is a recent transplant from the East Coast that is out-competing spotted owls in some areas. These interlopers are clearly a threat to spotted owls; the solution is not to reduce the protected habitat, but rather to increase it. Doug Heiken of the conservation group Oregon Wild put it this way: "If the in-laws move in with you, you don't make the house smaller; you make it bigger."

As DellaSala describes it, the process went from bad to worse with repeated memos coming down from DC, instructing the recovery committee to produce an alternative "less focused on habitat preservation," and above all, to sever all connections between the new recovery plan and the current recovery plan in place, which is the Northwest Forest Plan.

Ever since Bush took office, the timber industry has had its guns out for the Northwest Forest Plan. Their strategy is to take their new owl recovery plan and substitute it for the Northwest Forest Plan in major forest plan revisions coming up for both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. They are using the poor owl itself as the key to open the door to new old-growth timber sales.

It is time for Congress to step into this situation. Through the House Resources Committee hearings, Congress members have been made aware that the US Fish and Wildlife Service's new owl recovery plan is really an owl endangerment plan.

If the owl does survive, it will be because what little remains of its habitat has been preserved. Owls and forests are important for our well-being in many ways, but there is a new concern that Congress must consider now and that is global warming. Globally, deforestation accounts for around 25 percent of all carbon emissions. That's more than the entire transportation sector.

Keeping an old-growth forest intact is like keeping coal and oil in the ground. Protecting native, unlogged forests is an urgent but almost completely neglected solution to global warming.

The Democratic Congress has so far failed to either end the war in Iraq or come up with an effective legislative package to tackle the energy crisis and global warming. Maybe the Democrats should give protecting the last ancient forest of the Pacific Northwest a try.

The Democrats badly need a victory right now, and so do the owls.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is accepting your comments until August 24 at NSOplan@fws.gov.

---

Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry. She is the author of Primal Tears, an eco-thriller about a hybrid human-bonobo girl. Greg Bear, author of Darwin's Radio, says: "Primal Tears is primal storytelling, thoughtful and passionate. Kelpie Wilson wonderfully expands our definitions of human and family."

San Francisco Chronicle: On Education / No Child Left Behind Lowers the Bar on Shool Reform

President Bush seems a bit frantic as he campaigns for swift renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act, eager to salvage a late-inning win on the domestic policy front. He recently dropped into a Harlem charter school by helicopter, urging the Congress to pass No Child 2.0, no questions asked. Bush's education secretary, Margaret Spellings, pitched pithy remedies on a satirical news show. Washington simply needs "to expect more of our kids," Spellings said to the incredulous host, Jon Stewart.

But despite the Bush administration's orchestrated theatrics, the bipartisan coalition that crafted the original No Child law in 2001 is splintering badly, an unsettling development for those who count on Washington to help equalize educational opportunity in America. The first real test comes this month when Sen. Edward Kennedy -- Bush's odd bedfellow on both education and immigration reform -- intends to rally his congressional committee to move forward No Child's 1,100-page bundle of centralized school reforms. But sharp criticism is growing louder and from unexpected corners.

Speaking before thousands of cheering teachers in Washington last month, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., agreed that federal activism is required to boost the schools, "but not the kind of accountability that the NCLB law has imposed. The tests have become the curriculum instead of the other way around."

Former President Bill Clinton then sharpened the attack on No Child's holy grail -- standardized testing -- speaking to the nation's local school boards in San Francisco. "You don't need to test every child, every year," he said. A nationwide poll out late last month revealed that just more than two-thirds of all parents with school-age children believe that No Child should be rewritten or simply killed by the Congress.

Still, Bush insists that "the No Child Left Behind Act is working," as he proclaimed during his New York visit, running counter to the evidence.

Federal officials track children's learning curves in reading and math in each of three grade levels. Since No Child was approved, just one of these six trend lines has inched upward: fourth-grade math. The other five plots have gone flat or simply fallen. Progress in narrowing achievement gaps also has stalled, after closing markedly in the 1990s.

California students continue to inch upward within elementary schools. But Sacramento officials -- feeling enormous and unrealistic pressure to move all pupils toward proficiency under No Child -- tinker with state tests. After the state's third-grade scores failed to rise, test designers were nudged to make the questions a bit easier.

The aging Democratic bulls, including Kennedy and House Education Committee chair, U.S. Rep. George Miller of Martinez, risk perpetuating a costly and disappointing schools policy if they jump at the chance to cut a deal with Bush while failing to confront No Child's deep flaws.

Some testing experts, for instance, support Mr. Clinton's alternative.

Yearly exams given to every student are not essential in gauging how schools or student subgroups are performing over time. Federal monitoring of achievement gaps should continue, but it doesn't necessitate the huge chunks of time spent on test preparation that No Child now requires. Most surreal, No Child has pushed many states to lower, not raise, the bar that defines whether students test at "proficient" levels, given Washington's wishful mandate for universal proficiency.

Many states in response have simply lowered the hurdle that defines proficient student achievement. Texas claims that 79 percent of its fourth-graders are proficient readers; in California, where the bar is set higher, just 46 percent of all students are deemed proficient. In turn, Washington declares more schools as failing, because smaller shares of pupils clear the bar in states like California that set high standards.

States are adapting to Byzantine mandates from Washington. But governors and state school officials also game the system to create the illusion of rising achievement. So, its important to fix No Child in ways that retain a forceful yet surgical federal role. We certainly need a single benchmark for tracking student achievement over time.

Another monumental challenge facing the Congress is how to help states attract able and motivating teachers to work in flagging schools. But irrationality prevails again in No Child. Washington only credits schools for lifting students over the proficiency bar. This penalizes poor children -- and those who teach them -- who have much farther to climb to clear the hurdle than kids in better-off communities. Inner-city teachers quickly see their schools being slammed for being guilty on one count: trying to serve poor children.

Congressional Democrats may opt this summer for a middle ground, legislating a new effort to recruit and reward high-quality teachers while slowing down to judiciously work through the weaknesses of the larger No Child law. Such teacher legislation could finance crisp incentives to attract and retain the best teachers in urban schools. What's key for congressional Democrats is to avoid cutting an expedient deal with Bush. Instead, the Congress might first pass bipartisan legislation to enrich the teacher workforce, then move carefully to shape a federal role that truly lifts the schools.

Bruce Fuller, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, recently published "Standardized Childhood," (Stanford University Press, February 2007).

Bob Geiger's Saturday Cartoon Roundup ...6/0/2007...

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Rolling Stone : Giuliani: Worse Than Bush by Matt Taibbi...

Early Wednesday, May 16th, Charleston, South Carolina. The scene is a town-hall meeting staged by GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, only a day after he wowed a patriotic Republican crowd at a nationally televised debate with a righteous ass-kicking of the party's latest Hanoi Jane, terrorist sympathizer Ron Paul. A bump in the polls later, "America's Mayor" is back on the campaign trail -- in a room packed with standard-issue Adorable Schoolchildren, in this case beatific black kids in elementary school uniforms with wide eyes and big RUDY stickers pinned to their oblivious breasts.

Giuliani has good stage presence, but his physical appearance is problematic -- virtually neckless, all shoulders and forehead and overbite, with a hunched-over, Draculoid posture that recalls, oddly enough, George W. Bush, the vestigial stoop of a once-chubby kid who grew up hiding tittie pictures from nuns. Not handsome, not cuddly, if he wins this thing it's going to be by projecting toughness and man-aura. But all presidential candidates have to play the baby-kissing game, and here is an early chance for Rudy to show his softer side.

"So," he whispers to the kids. "What do you all want to be when you grow up? Do any of you know?"

A bucktoothed boy raises his hand.

"I wanna be a doctor," he says, "and a lawyer."

The crowd laughs, then looks at Rudy expectantly. The obvious line is "A doctor and a lawyer? Whaddya want to do, sue yourself?" and you can see Rudy physically straining for the joke. But this candidate's funny bone is a microscopic thing, like one of those anvil-shaped deals in the ear, and the line eludes him.

"A doctor and a lawyer, huh?" he says, grinning nervously. "Uh . . . whaddya want to do, sue the doctor?"

My notes from that moment read: Chirping crickets.

Rudy moves on. "How about you?" he says to the next boy.

"I want to be a policeman!" the kid says.

Rudy smiles. Then the next boy says he wants to be a fireman, and the crowd twitters: Wow, a fireman and a policeman, in the same room! Rudy is beaming now, almost certainly aware that every grown-up present is suddenly thinking about 9/11. His day. As he leans over, the room is filled with popping flashbulbs. Then, instead of capitalizing on the sense of pride and shared purpose everyone is feeling, Giuliani utters something truly strange and twisted.

"A fireman and a policeman, huh?" he says. "Well, the first thing that I want to do is make sure that you two get along."

Huh? Amid confused applause, Rudy flashes a queer smile, then moves on to the heart of his presentation, a neat little speech about how the election of a Democratic president will result in certain nuclear attack and the end of the free market as we know it. I'm barely listening, however, still thinking about the "make sure you get along" line.

Although few people outside of New York know it yet, there is an emerging controversy over Giuliani's heroic 9/11 legacy. Critics charge that Rudy's failure to resolve the feuding between the city's police and firefighters prior to the attack led to untold numbers of deaths, the most tragic example being the inability of firemen to hear warnings from police helicopters about the impending collapse of the South Tower. The 9/11 Commission concluded that the two departments had been "designed to work independently, not together," and that greater coordination would have spared many lives.

Given all that, why did Rudy offer this weirdly unsolicited reference to the controversy now? Was he joking? And if so, what the fuck? It was a strange and bitter comment to make, especially right on the heels of his grand-slam performance in the previous night's debate. If this is a guy who chews over a perceived slight in the middle of a victory lap, what's he going to be like with his finger on the button? Even Richard Nixon wasn't wound that tight.

--

Rudy giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they're probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he'll keep an eye on 'em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully's disposal.

Rudy's attack against Ron Paul in the debate was a classic example of that kind of politics, a Rovian masterstroke. The wizened Paul, a grandfather seventeen times over who is running for the Republican nomination at least 100 years too late, was making a simple isolationist argument, suggesting that our lengthy involvement in Middle Eastern affairs -- in particular our bombing of Iraq in the 1990s -- was part of the terrorists' rationale in attacking us.

Though a controversial statement for a Republican politician to make, it was hardly refutable from a factual standpoint -- after all, Osama bin Laden himself cited America's treatment of Iraq in his 1996 declaration of war. Giuliani surely knew this, but he jumped all over Paul anyway, demanding that Paul take his comment back. "I don't think I've ever heard that before," he hissed, "and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th."

It was like the new convict who comes into prison the first day and punches the weakest guy in the cafeteria in the teeth, and the Southern crowd exploded in raucous applause. Coupled with yet another implosion by aneurysm-in-waiting John McCain a few days later ("Fuck you! I know more about this than anyone else in the room!" McCain screamed at a fellow senator during a meeting about immigration), the Ron Paul ass-whipping revived Giuliani's standing among conservatives who lately had begun to abandon him over his pro-choice status.

The Paul incident went to the very heart of who Giuliani is as a politician. To the extent that conservatism in the Bush years has morphed into a celebration of mindless patriotism and the paranoid witch-hunting of liberals and other dissenters, Rudy seems the most anxious of any Republican candidate to take up that mantle. Like Bush, Rudy has repeatedly shown that he has no problem lumping his enemies in with "the terrorists" if that's what it takes to get over. When the 9/11 Commission raised criticisms of his fire department, for instance, Giuliani put the bipartisan panel in its place for daring to question his leadership. "Our anger," he declared, "should clearly be directed at one source and one source alone -- the terrorists who killed our loved ones."

Whether Rudy believes in this kind of politics reflexively, as the psychologically crippled Bush does, or as a means to an end, as Karl Rove does, isn't clear. But there's no question that Giuliani has made the continuation of Swift-Boating politics a linchpin of his candidacy. His political hires speak deeply to that tendency. Chris Henick, formerly Karl Rove's most trusted deputy, is now a key aide at Giuliani Partners, the security firm set up by the mayor to cash in on his 9/11 image. One of his top donors, Richard Collins, is a longtime Bush supporter who was instrumental in setting up "Stop Her Now," a 527 group modeled on Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that will be used to attack Hillary Clinton. And the money for the smear campaign comes from the same Texas sources behind the Swift Boaters, including oilman T. Boone Pickens and Houston home builder Bob Perry.

To further emulate the Bush-Rove model, Giuliani has recruited some thirty Bush "Pioneers," the key fund-raisers who served as the president's $100,000 bagmen. In addition, he hired the woman who spearheaded the Pioneer program to be his chief fund-raiser. "Rudy definitely got some of Bush's heavier hitters, including all the Swift Boater types," says Alex Cohen, a senior researcher at Public Citizen, who tracks the president's top donors.

--

Rudy's stump speech on the trail these days is short and sweet. He talks about two things -- national security and free-market capitalism -- and his catchphrase for both is "going on offense." When he talks about "economic offense," Giuliani is ostensibly communicating the usual conservative contempt for taxes and big government. But he means more than that. Like the Bush-Cheney crew, Rudy believes everything should be for sale, even public policy -- particularly when he's in a position to do the selling.

In his years as mayor -- and his subsequent career as a lobbyist -- Rudy jumped into bed with anyone who could afford a rubber. Saudi Arabia, Rupert Murdoch, tobacco interests, pharmaceutical companies, private prisons, Bechtel, ChevronTexaco -- Giuliani took money from them all. You could change Rudy's mind literally in the time it took to write a check. A former prosecutor, Giuliani used to call drug dealers "murderers." But as a lobbyist he agreed to represent Seisint, a security firm run by former cocaine smuggler Hank Asher. "I have a great admiration for what he's doing," Rudy gushed after taking $2 million of Asher's money.

As mayor, Rudy had a history of asking financially interested parties to help shape important government policies. At one point, he allowed a deputy mayor who was on the payroll of Major League Baseball to work on deals for the Yankees and Mets; at another point he commissioned a $600,000 report on privatizing JFK and LaGuardia from a consultant with ties to the British Airport Authority, Rudy's handpicked choice to manage the airports.

And let's not forget Bernie Kerik, Rudy's very own hairy-assed Sancho Panza, who was nixed as director of Homeland Security after investigators uncovered a gift he received from a construction firm with alleged mob ties that wanted to do business with Giuliani's administration. It is a testament to the monstrous breadth of Rudy's chutzpah that he used his post-9/11 celebrity to push his personal bagman for a post that milks the world's hugest security-contracts tit -- at the very moment when he himself was creating a security-services company.

Then there's 9/11. Like Bush's, Rudy's career before the bombing was in the toilet; New Yorkers had come to think of him as an ambition-sick meanie whose personal scandals were truly wearying to think about. But on the day of the attack, it must be admitted, Rudy hit the perfect note; he displayed all the strength and reassuring calm that Bush did not, and for one day at least, he was everything you'd want in a leader. Then he woke up the next day and the opportunist in him saw that there was money to be made in an America high on fear.

For starters, Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He's traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the "WTC cough." This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy's 9/11 hero image -- the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. While the cleanup effort at the Pentagon was turned over to federal agencies like OSHA, which quickly sealed off the site and required relief workers to wear hazmat suits, the World Trade Center cleanup was handed over to Giuliani. The city's Department of Design and Construction (DDC) promptly farmed out the waste-clearing effort to a smattering of politically connected companies, including Bechtel, Bovis and AMEC construction.

The mayor pledged to reopen downtown in no time, and internal DDC memos indicate that the cleanup was directed at a breakneck pace. One memo to DDC chief Michael Burton warned, "Project management appears to only address safety issues when convenient for the schedule of the project." Burton, however, had his own priorities: He threatened to fire contractors if "the highest level of efficiency is not maintained."

Although respiratory-mask use was mandatory, the city allowed a macho culture to develop on the site: Even the mayor himself showed up without a mask. By October, it was estimated, masks were being worn on site as little as twenty-nine percent of the time. Rudy proclaimed that there were "no significant problems" with the air at the World Trade Center. But there was something wrong with the air: It was one of the most dangerous toxic-waste sites in human history, full of everything from benzene to asbestos and PCBs to dioxin (the active ingredient in Agent Orange). Since the cleanup ended, police and firefighters have reported a host of serious illnesses -- respiratory ailments like sarcoidosis; leukemia and lymphoma and other cancers; and immune-system problems.

"The likelihood is that more people will eventually die from the cleanup than from the original accident," says David Worby, an attorney representing thousands of cleanup workers in a class-action lawsuit against the city. "Giuliani wears 9/11 like a badge of honor, but he screwed up so badly."

When I first spoke to Worby, he was on his way home from the funeral of a cop. "One thing about Giuliani," he told me. "He's never been to a funeral of a cleanup worker."

Indeed, Rudy has had little at all to say about the issue. About the only move he's made to address the problem was to write a letter urging Congress to pass a law capping the city's liability at $350 million.

Did Giuliani know the air at the World Trade Center was poison? Who knows -- but we do know he took over the cleanup, refusing to let more experienced federal agencies run the show. He stood on a few brick piles on the day of the bombing, then spent the next ten months making damn sure everyone worked the night shift on-site while he bonked his mistress and negotiated his gazillion-dollar move to the private sector. Meanwhile, the people who actually cleaned up the rubble got used to checking their stool for blood every morning.

Now Giuliani is running for president -- as the hero of 9/11. George Bush has balls, too, but even he has to bow to this motherfucker.

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LA Times: George McGovern: Cheney is Wrong About Me, Wrong About War...

The 1972 presidential nominee strikes back at the vice president for comparing today's Democrats to the McGovern platform.

By George S. McGovern, GEORGE S. MCGOVERN, a former U.S. senator from South Dakota, was the Democratic nominee for president in 1972. - April 24, 2007
###

VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney recently attacked my 1972 presidential platform and contended that today's Democratic Party has reverted to the views I advocated in 1972. In a sense, this is a compliment, both to me and the Democratic Party. Cheney intended no such compliment. Instead, he twisted my views and those of my party beyond recognition. The city where the vice president spoke, Chicago, is sometimes dubbed "the Windy City." Cheney converted the chilly wind of Chicago into hot air.

Cheney said that today's Democrats have adopted my platform from the 1972 presidential race and that, in doing so, they will raise taxes. But my platform offered a balanced budget. I proposed nothing new without a carefully defined way of paying for it. By contrast, Cheney and his team have run the national debt to an all-time high.

He also said that the McGovern way is to surrender in Iraq and leave the U.S. exposed to new dangers. The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

In the war of my youth, World War II, I volunteered for military service at the age of 19 and flew 35 combat missions, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross as the pilot of a B-24 bomber. By contrast, in the war of his youth, the Vietnam War, Cheney got five deferments and has never seen a day of combat — a record matched by President Bush.

Cheney charged that today's Democrats don't appreciate the terrorist danger when they move to end U.S. involvement in the Iraq war. The fact is that Bush and Cheney misled the public when they implied that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. That was the work of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda team. Cheney and Bush blew the effort to trap Bin Laden in Afghanistan by their sluggish and inept response after the 9/11 attacks.

They then foolishly sent U.S. forces into Iraq against the advice and experience of such knowledgeable men as former President George H.W. Bush, his secretary of State, James A. Baker III, and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft.

Just as the Bush administration mistakenly asserted Iraq's involvement in the 9/11 attacks, it also falsely contended that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. When former Ambassador Joseph Wilson exploded the myth that Iraq attempted to obtain nuclear materials from Niger, Cheney's top aide and other Bush officials leaked to the media that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent (knowingly revealing the identity of a covert agent is illegal).

In attacking my positions in 1972 as representative of "that old party of the early 1970s," Cheney seems oblivious to the realities of that time. Does he remember that the Democratic Party, with me in the lead, reformed the presidential nomination process to ensure that women, young people and minorities would be represented fairly? The so-called McGovern reform rules are still in effect and, indeed, have been largely copied by the Republicans.

The Democrats' 1972 platform was also in the forefront in pushing for affordable healthcare, full employment with better wages, a stronger environmental and energy effort, support for education at every level and a foreign policy with less confrontation and belligerence and more cooperation and conciliation.

Cheney also still has his eyes closed to the folly of the Vietnam War, in which 58,000 young Americans and more than 2 million Vietnamese died. Vietnam was no threat to the United States.

On one point I do agree with Cheney: Today's Democrats are taking positions on the Iraq war similar to the views I held toward the Vietnam War. But that is all to the good.

The war in Iraq has greatly increased the terrorist danger. There was little or no terrorism, insurgency or civil war in Iraq before Bush and Cheney took us into war there five years ago. Now Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism, a bloody insurgency against our troops and a civil war.

Beyond the deaths of more than 3,100 young Americans and an estimated 600,000 Iraqis, we have spent nearly $500 billion on the war, which has dragged on longer than World War II.

The Democrats are right. Let's bring our troops home from this hopeless war.

There is one more point about 1972 for Cheney's consideration. After winning 11 state primaries in a field of 16 contenders, I won the Democratic presidential nomination. I then lost the general election to President Nixon. Indeed, the entrenched incumbent president, with a campaign budget 10 times the size of mine, the power of the White House behind him and a highly negative and unethical campaign, defeated me overwhelmingly. But lest Cheney has forgotten, a few months after the election, investigations by the Senate and an impeachment proceeding in the House forced Nixon to become the only president in American history to resign the presidency in disgrace.

Who was the real loser of '72?

THE VICE PRESIDENT spoke with contempt of my '72 campaign, but he might do well to recall that I began that effort with these words: "I make one pledge above all others — to seek and speak the truth." We made some costly tactical errors after winning the nomination, but I never broke my pledge to speak the truth. That is why I have never felt like a loser since 1972. In contrast, Cheney and Bush have repeatedly lied to the American people.

It is my firm belief that the Cheney-Bush team has committed offenses that are worse than those that drove Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew and Atty. Gen. John Mitchell from office after 1972. Indeed, as their repeated violations of the Constitution and federal statutes, as well as their repudiation of international law, come under increased consideration, I expect to see Cheney and Bush forced to resign their offices before 2008 is over.

Aside from a growing list of impeachable offenses, the vice president has demonstrated his ignorance of foreign policy by attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for visiting Syria. Apparently he thinks it is wrong to visit important Middle East states that sometimes disagree with us. Isn't it generally agreed that Nixon's greatest achievement was talking to the Chinese Communist leaders, which opened the door to that nation? And wasn't President Reagan's greatest achievement talking with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev until the two men worked out an end to the Cold War? Does Cheney believe that it's better to go to war rather than talk with countries with which we have differences?

We, of course, already know that when Cheney endorses a war, he exempts himself from participation. On second thought, maybe it's wise to keep Cheney off the battlefield — he might end up shooting his comrades rather than the enemy.

On a more serious note, instead of listening to the foolishness of the neoconservative ideologues, the Cheney-Bush team might better heed the words of a real conservative, Edmund Burke: "A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood."

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Rocky Mountain News - Columnist: Paul Campos: Loose Cannon...

April 24, 2007

Two years ago, Georgia Thompson, a 55-year-old midlevel civil servant with no interest in politics, was assigned the task of helping to decide what travel agency the state of Wisconsin would use. The bidding process came down to two contestants: Adelman Travel and Omega Travel.

Adelman was the low bidder, and the selection committee also concluded it would provide higher quality service than Omega. But because of a poorly designed procedure that gave great weight to which bidder had the most impressive Power Point presentation, Omega finished slightly ahead of Adelman in the committee's initial overall scoring process.

Thompson suspected her administrative superiors would be annoyed if the contract were awarded to a bidder offering a lower-quality product at a higher price, so she persuaded the committee to allow rebidding on a best and final basis, as state law allowed. After its new bid, Adelman was awarded the contract.

Eighteen months later, Thompson found herself in a federal prison, with her career destroyed and her life savings spent. She ended up there because Steve Biskupic, the U.S. attorney for Milwaukee, spent more than a year convicting her of an imaginary crime.

Biskupic's initial theory was that Thompson steered the contract to Adelman because Adelman's owners had (perfectly legally) contributed $10,000 to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's re-election campaign, and that she had been bribed to reward Adelman.

This theory had a few problems.

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